Heal Yourself From The Inside Out, with Dr. Martin Katz

Daniel Amen, MD:
Welcome to the Brain Warrior's Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcasts, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body.
Daniel Amen, MD:
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Tana Amen, BSN RN:
The Brain Warrior's Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to BrainMD.com.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Welcome back. We are here with our friend, Dr. Martin Katz. We're having a great discussion about functional medicine, but specifically helping you learn about the power of sulforaphanes, which has great research and helps with detoxification and decreasing inflammation. And we're going to talk in this podcast about when should you consider adding it to your supplement regimen.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Yeah, this is so much fun for me because you're speaking my language now. I get super excited about all of the nutrients and nutraceuticals. So please, if you have learned anything or you found anything really helpful, write to us, TheBrainWarriorsWay.com, our podcast.com. And you can take a screenshot, you can post it on social media, tag us. You can tag us at Brain Warrior's Way podcast, you can tag us individually, but we want to hear from you because that's our joy that when we get these comments from you and we know what you're learning. We would love for you to leave us reviews, and we love your questions and comments, because when you send them to us and we answer them, it enters you into a drawing for either my cookbook or your book, The End Of Mental Illness.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Great. All right, Martin, let's make this really simple and practical for people. When should they think of adding this to their regimen? We always talk about how supplements don't treat diseases. What they do is they support the processes in your health, so we have supplements that support mood, that support focus, that support memory.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
One way that I think about this when people ask me about it, it's like it minds the gap. But one thing I like to think about is when I was in the ICU, we're always doing things to quickly put bandages over bullet holes, right, because we have to. It's like we're putting a bandage over it, right?
Daniel Amen, MD:
We're patching up bullet holes.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
But it's a great analogy. We're putting bandages over bullet holes, whereas when you have the time to educate people and make sure they stay out of those situations, you're preventing it. You're keeping them healthy. And so I think of supplements and lifestyle and food and all these things, these nutraceuticals, as how we prevent the bullet hole to begin with, or how we heal it from the inside out so that we can take that bandage off, which isn't going to hold. So, we remove the bandage that's not going to hold very long by healing it from the inside out, right?
Martin Katz:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. What I would say is that ... A couple of things I'd like to just add that you show up to a lot of these conferences, sometimes you show up to these conferences, and you're speaking to the choir ready, or you're singing to the choir ready. And so what I would say is if ... yeah, exactly, Tana ... If what you're hearing is not news to you, please forward it to others who you love, your loved ones, if you feel like they can get something out of it. Because the more people hear about this, the more people understand that they need to be taking care of their health, the bigger and better the chance that we can have a paradigm shift in chronic healthcare, in chronic disease management.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
If I could have one thing before you go on, I'm sorry to interrupt you-
Martin Katz:
Sure.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
... but you asked me a really important question before we started the podcast. And you said, "How is it that you decided this was so important and you got started? It's so hard to get patients to understand sometimes. What made you take your health so seriously that you just went on this journey?" And it's, that's the thing, if we could get people to understand.
And for me, when you asked that question, my answer to you, and what I'm hoping that people listening will understand if they're not feeling well, whether it's depression from the pandemic or inflammation and you're tired or whatever it is, the thing that got me going was being on nine medications. I would rather take 30 supplements that don't have side effects than nine medications that made me feel awful, so that's what made me go on the journey was feeling terrible enough and wanting to be off of those medications that had side effects. So to answer, to join in with what you're saying, for people who are listening, if you know this, that's great, but if you don't and you're listening, why would you do this? Because you don't feel good, and there's another way. It doesn't mean you're going to get off of all your medications. I didn't. I'll be on medications for the rest of my life and I'm grateful for them, but I don't need to be on nine of them, so with all these side effects, right?
Martin Katz:
Right. Yeah, so what I would say ... There's a couple of things I'd like to say. If you feel like you're doing everything right, you're eating really well, and not just broccoli, but from the isothiocyanate family or what's called the cruciferous family. So that's bok choy and kohlrabi and wasabi and cabbage and broccoli, broccoli sprouts and Brussels sprouts and you name it, and you're eating a variety of foods, and again, I'm diet agnostic. I don't prescribe to any one type of diet. I'm a big fan of understanding what's good for you, and what's good for you is going to be different what's good for your neighbor. So, don't just listen to ... Be intentional about yourself so that you're bringing best health to yourself. If you're eating really well, you're exercising, you're sleeping well, have limited stress or you're managing your stress well, or you've got a great community and you're feeling great, do you need to be taking sulforaphane? I don't know.
But if you're not doing those things or you're struggling or you're not feeling well, it brings about Dean Ornish's idea of the kitchen sink. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with that, but I absolutely love this analogy and I've taken it because I just love it so much. And so Dean Ornish said that, he was talking about cardiovascular disease, and he said that in this country, the taps are on, the plug is in, the sink is filling up, and it's overflowing. And what we do in this country is we're looking for the best mops, the best tiles, the best sponges, and we're trying to mop up that mess. It's not the answer, people. Switch off the faucet. Stop allowing all this, all this toxins and all the stress into your system, and pull up the plug. Allow it to go out.
The way I take it further is, yeah, we still got the faucets on, but the problem, what we don't realize, is we haven't intentionally stopped up the sink. We haven't intentionally plugged it up. It's happened over time because of this oxidative stress, because of inflammation, because our immune system is not working as well, because our selves are losing identity, and David Sinclair's work with the whole sirtuins. So, our selves are losing identity.
We've done really cool studies on something called glyphosate and gap junctions, and glyphosates happen to disrupt gap junctions, and these gap junctions are really cool, little proteins that are intercellular. They go between cells, and they're communicating, and there's six different proteins and they're different depending on what organ you're looking at. So it's likely that these cells are developing their identification through these gap junctions, so I always wonder, if I cut myself, how does my skin know to grow back? How does that identify skin? And it's possibly through sirtuins, it's possibly through gap junctions, we don't absolutely know.
But again, glyphosate disrupts that and has an effect on the cell in many different ways. It also breaks the gut and we don't have to get into glyphosate, but it's certainly a toxin. But all of these toxins are plugging up the sink, and again, not intentionally. We go to the grocery store, we get what we need. We're living in these hygiene hypothesis areas, so our microbiome's not as good. You know, there's so many. And we go into hotels and there's all these flame retardants. I mean, it's just, you go on and on, plus we're stressed out about, do we have enough money? Now, how are we going to deal with our kids who are at home, because they're not at school anymore. I need to work, blah, blah.
So there's all these ongoing stresses that unfortunately create an oxidative load, this glucocorticoid load. Another book that I've enjoyed reading is Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which sort of talks about-
Daniel Amen, MD:
Oh, that's a great book.
Martin Katz:
Yeah. Which sort of talks about this ongoing stress. And so here we are adding everything to the sink, in the kitchen sink, and the taps are on. And so when I start talking to my patients and I just ... Some of them, Daniel, you know this, and Tana, you know this, you look at them, you're like, "Oh, I don't know. You look like you're a metabolic syndrome risk," or you look at smokers and their skin's just not as healthy, and they're starting to have clubbing of their fingers. You can just look at these people. They don't look as healthy.
Or you get some lab work and you see that their LDL oxidized is a little bit higher, or their C-reactive protein's a little high, and you just realize that their system is not as good. Or they come in and they're 42 and they look like they're 52, so there's this idea about chronological age versus biological age. And that's where I see self-
Daniel Amen, MD:
We only have a minute left.
Martin Katz:
Oh, sorry.
Daniel Amen, MD:
So, let's [inaudible 00:10:09] it. If you're struggling with feeling fatigued, if you're in a toxic environment, or now in a pandemic, I think our baseline stress for all of us has gone up about 30%. That can be helpful. How else?
Martin Katz:
[crosstalk 00:00:10:34].
Daniel Amen, MD:
If you just had to give me a list of five things that would help me know that this would be helpful, and then for people that are interested, they can go to broccoli.com/Amen, A-M-E-N, and learn more about it. But can you just give me that quick summary in just five words?
Martin Katz:
Five words? Well, so again, if you have inflammation, dealing with inflammation, sulforaphane's going to be excellent because it's going to help you-
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
So pain would be a symptom, right?
Martin Katz:
Pain would be, but again, that's the thing is we've got to get away from this idea of treating acute symptoms because now it's too late.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Right.
Martin Katz:
You don't want to wait for pain. We've got to realize we got to look under the hood and realize that there's other things that are happening. We're slowly clogging up, plugging up this drain. You don't want to wait till its end, to be clogged, because it's going to overflow then. We want to get to it and slowly decrease it so our cells can work optimally, so we can balance the oxidative stress, which sulforaphane does so beautifully.
It is the most powerful turn-on of NRF2, which is just so instrumental in helping us increase glutathione, all these oxidative stress. It helps to decrease inflammation through NF kappa B. So again, brain health, joint health, you name it, we see it. And one of the things we hear a lot is people just say, "I'm thinking more clearly," because it's allowing the system to clean up. You're burning more cleanly and so your cells are now more healthy. So I would say it's hard for me to not want everybody on sulforaphane, quite honestly, because we do live in a very toxic world. And quite honestly, I'm not sure why more people don't know about sulforaphane and part of the reason we're trying to get out there and educate people, just because it's such a powerful molecule with so many resounding studies behind it. And for that matter, there's thousands of studies on NRF2, which again, broccoli is the most powerful, natural supplement to turn on.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Great. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Martin Katz.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
And I could just go on and on and talk about this. I get so excited about it.
Daniel Amen, MD:
That's, I think, why I fell in love with you.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
I know. I'm kind of a nerd.
Daniel Amen, MD:
A pretty redhead that knows about sulforaphanes and was so excited.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Yeah. I don't go to concerts. I go to seminars.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Now, there's [crosstalk 00:12:56] so what did you learn during this podcast? Write it down, post it, write it down, take a picture, post it on any of your social media sites. Leave us comments, questions or reviews at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. We'll enter you into a raffle. And if we answer one of your questions on the podcast, you will win. So, we just hope all of you stay safe during this weird, challenging time, and Martin, thank you so much for being with us on the Brain Warrior's Way podcast.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Yeah, it was really great. Thank you.
Martin Katz:
Thank you so much for having me. Just wonderful. Thanks for what you guys do as well.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
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Daniel Amen, MD:
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